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Jan 29, 2016

Retrotopia: Lines of Separation

Author's Note: This is the fourteenth installment of an exploration of some
of the possible futures discussed on this blog, using the toolkit of narrative
fiction. Our narrator returns from his trip to a tier one county full of doubts
about the Lakeland Republic’s prospects, and has those at once challenged and
sharpened by a conversation at the local Atheist Assembly...

I’d had lunch with Ruth Mellencamp at a pleasant little
diner a block from the station before I caught the train, so I had nothing to
do until I got to Defiance but watch farmland roll by and think about what I’d
seen since I’d crossed the border less than a week before. My reactions were an
odd mix of reluctant admiration and unwilling regret. The people of the
Lakeland Republic had taken a situation that would have crushed most
countries—an international embargo backed up with repeated attempts at regime
change—and turned it into their advantage, using isolation from the capital
flows and market pressures of the global economy to give them space to return
to older ways of doing things that actually produced better results than the
modern equivalents.

The problem with that, I told myself, was that it couldn’t
last. That was the thing that had bothered me, the night after I’d toured the
New Shaker settlement, though it had taken another day to come into focus. The
whole Lakeland Republic was like the New Shakers, the sort of fragile
artificial construct that only worked because it isolated itself from the rest
of the world. Now that the embargo was over and the borders with the other
North American republics were open, the isolation was gone, and I didn’t see
any reason to think the Republic’s back-to-the-past ideology would be strong
enough by itself in the face of the overwhelming pressures the global economy
could bring to bear.

That wasn’t even the biggest challenge they faced, though.
The real challenge was progress—the sheer onward momentum of science and
technology in the rest of the world. Sure, I admitted, the Lakeland Republic
had done some very clever things with old technology—the Frankens blowing
drones out of the sky with a basement-workshop maser kept coming to mind—but
sooner or later the habit of trying to push technology into reverse gear was going
to collide catastrophically with the latest round of scientific or technical
breakthroughs, with or without military involvement, and leave the Lakelanders
with the hard choice between collapse and a return to the modern world.

A week earlier, I probably would have considered that a good
thing. As the train rolled into Defiance, I wasn’t so sure. The thing was, the
Lakeland Republic really had managed some impressive things withtheir great leap backward, and in a certain
sense, it was a shame that progress was going to steamroller them in due time.
Most of the time, people say “progress” and they mean that things get better,
but it was sinking in that this wasn’t always true.

I picked up a copy of that day’s Toledo Blade from a
newsboy in the Defiance station, and used that as an excuse to think about
something else once I boarded the train back to Toledo. The previous day’s
drone shoot was right there on page one, with a nice black and white picture of
Maude Duesenberg getting her sixth best-of-shoot trophy, and a big feature back
in the sports section with tables listing how all the competitors had
done.I didn’t pay attention to anything
else on the front page at first, though, because another satellite had been
hit.

The Progresso IV and the the Russian telecom
satellite were bad enough, but this one was a good deal worse, because it was
parked in a graveyard orbit—one of the orbital zones where everybody’s been
sticking their defunct satellites since it sank in that leaving them in working
orbits wasn’t a good plan. There’s a lot of hardware in most of the
graveyard-orbit zones, and though they’re well away from the working orbits
that doesn’t really matter once you get a Kessler syndrome started and scrap
metal starts spalling in all directions at twenty thousand miles an hour. That
was basically what was happening; a defunct weather satellite had taken a stray
chunk of the Progresso IV right in the belly, and it had just enough
fuel for its maneuvering thrusters left in the tanks to blow up. A couple of
amateur astronomers spotted the flash, and the astronomy people at the
University of Toledo announced that they’d given up trying to calculate where
all the shrapnel was going; at this point, a professor said, it was just a
matter of time before the whole midrange was shut down as completely as low
earth orbit.

That was big news, not least because the assault drones I’d
watched people potshotting out of the air depend on satellite links.Oh, there are other ways to go about
controlling them, but they’re clumsy compared to satellite, and you’ve also got
the risk that somebody will take out your drones by blocking your
signals—that’s happened more than once in the last couple of decades, and I’ll
let you imagine what the results were for the side that suddenly lost its
drones. Of course that wasn’t the only thing that was in trouble:
telecommunications, weather forecasting, military reconnaissance, you name it,
with the low orbits gone and the geosynchronous going, the midrange orbits were
the only thing left, and now that door was slamming shut one collision at a
time.

It occurred to me that the Lakeland Republic was one of the
few countries in the world that wasn’t going to be inconvenienced by the
worsening of the satellite crisis. Still, I told myself, that’s a special case,
and paged further back. The rest of the first section was ordinary news: the
Chinese were trying to broker a ceasefire between the warring factions in
California; the prime minister of Québec had left on a state visit to Europe;
the melting season in Antarctica had gotten off to a very bad start, with a big
new iceflow from Marie Byrd Land dumping bergs way too fast. I shook my head,
read on.

Further in was the arts and entertainment section. I flipped
through that, and in there among the plays and music gigs and schedules for the
local radio programs was something that caught my eye and then made me mutter
something impolite under my breath. The Lakeland National Opera was about to
premier its new production of Parsifal the following week, and every
performance was sold out. Sure, I mostly listen to classic jazz, but I have a
soft spot for opera from way back—my grandmother was a fan and used to play CDs
of her favorite operas all the time, and it would have been worth an evening to
check it out. No such luck, though: from the article, I gathered that even the
scalpers had run out of tickets. I turned the page.

I finished the paper maybe fifteen minutes before the train
pulled into the Toledo station. A horsedrawn taxi took me back to my hotel; I
spent a while reviewing my notes, got dinner, and made an early night of it,
since I had plans the next morning.

At nine-thirty sharp—I’d checked the streetcar schedule with
the concierge—I left the hotel and caught the same streetcar line I’d taken to
the Mikkelson plant. This time I wasn’t going anything like so far: a dozen
blocks, just far enough to get out of the retail district. I hit the bell just
before the streetcar got to the Capitol Atheist Assembly.

Half a dozen other people got off the streetcar with me, and
as soon as we figured out that we were all going the same place, the usual
friendly noises followed. We filed in through a pleasant lobby that had the
usual pictures of famous Atheists on the walls, and then into the main hall,
where someone up front was doing a better than usual job with a Bach fugue on
the piano, while members and guests of the Assembly milled around, greeted
friends, and settled into their seats. Michael Finch, who’d told me about the
Assembly, was there already—he excused himself from a conversation, came over
and greeted me effusively—and when I finally got someplace where I could see
the pianist, it turned out to be Sam Capoferro, the kid I’d seen playing at the
hotel restaurant my first day in town. He gave me a grin, kept on playing Bach.

We all got seated eventually. What followed was the same
sort of Sunday service you’d get in any other Atheist Assembly in North
America: the Litany, the lighting of the symbolic Lamp of Reason, and a couple
of songs from the choir, backed by Capoferro’s lively piano playing. There was
a reading from one of Mark Twain’s pieces on religion, followed by an
entertaining talk on Twain himself—his birthday was coming up soon, I thought I
remembered. Then we all stood and sang “Imagine,” and headed for coffee and
cookies in the social hall downstairs.

“Anything like what you get at the Philadelphia Assembly?”
Finch asked me as we sat at one of the big tables in the social hall.

“The music’s a bit livelier,” I said, “and the talk was
frankly more interesting than we usually get in Philly. Other than that, pretty
familiar.”

“That’s good to hear,” said a brown-skinned guy about my
age, who was just then settling into a chair on the other side of the table.
“Even with the borders open, we don’t have anything like the sort of contacts
with Assemblies elsewhere that I’d like.”

“Mr. Carr,” Finch said, “this is Rajiv Mohandas—he’s on the
administrative council here. Rajiv, this is Peter Carr, who I told you about.”

We shook hands, and Mohandas gave me a broad smile. “Michael
tells me that you were out at the annual drone shoot Friday. That must have
been quite an experience.”

“In several senses of the word,” I said, and he laughed.

We got to talking, about Assembly doings there in Toledo and
back home in Philadelphia, and a couple of other people joined in. None of it
was anything out of the ordinary until somebody, I forget who, mentioned in
passing the Assembly’s annual property tax bill.”

“Hold it,” I said. “You have to pay property taxes?” They
nodded, and I went on:“Do you have
trouble getting Assemblies recognized as churches, or something?”

“No, not at all,”Mohandas said. “Are churches still tax-exempt in the Atlantic Republic?
Here, they’re not.”

That startled me. “Seriously?”

Mohandas nodded, and an old woman with white hair and
gold-rimmed glasses, a little further down the table, said, “Mr. Carr, are you
familiar with the controversy over the separation of church and state back in
the old Union?”

“More or less,” I said. “It’s still a live issue back home.”

She nodded. “The way we see it, it simply didn’t work out,
because the churches weren’t willing to stay on their side of the line. They
were perfectly willing to take the tax exemption and all, and then turned
around and tried to tell the government what to do.”

“True enough,” Mohandas said. “Didn’t matter whether they
were on the left or the right, politically speaking.Every religious organization in the old
United States seemed to think that the separation of church and state meant it
had the right to use the political system to push its own agendas—”

“—but skies above help you if you asked any of them to help
cover the costs of the system they were so eager to use,” said the old woman.

“So the Lakeland Republic doesn’t have the separation of
church and state?” I asked.

“Depends on what you mean by that,” the old woman said. “The
constitution grants absolute freedom of belief to every citizen, forbids the
enactment of any law that privileges any form of religious belief or unbelief
over any other, and bars the national government from spending tax money for
religious purposes. There’s plenty of legislation and case law backing that up,
too. But we treat creedal associations—”

I must have given her quite the blank look over that phrase,
because she laughed. “I know, it sounds silly. We must have spent six months in
committee arguing back and forth over what phrase we could use that would
include churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, assemblies, and every other
kind of religious and quasireligious body you care to think of. That was the
best we could do.”

I’d gotten most of the way around to recognizing her before
Finch spoke. I’d read about Mary Chenkin in briefing papers I’d been given
before this trip. She’d been a major player in Lakeland Republic politics since
Partition, a delegate to their constitutional convention, a presence in both
houses of the legislature, and then the third President of the Republic.As for “Senator,” I recalled that all their
ex-presidents became at-large members of the upper house and kept the position
until they died. “Very pleased to meet you,” I said. “You were saying about
creedal associations.”

“Just that for legal purposes, they’re like any other
association. They pay taxes, they’re subject to all the usual health and safety
regulations, their spokespeople are legally accountable if they incite others
to commit crimes—”

“Is that an issue?” I asked.

“Not for a good many years,” Chenkin said. “There were a few
cases early on—you probably know that some religious groups before the Second
Civil War used to preach violence against people they didn’t like, and then
hide behind freedom-of-religion arguments to duck responsibility when their
followers took them at their word and did something appalling. They couldn’t
have gotten away with it if they hadn’t been behind a pulpit—advocating the
commission of a crime isn’t protected free speech by anyone’s definition—and
they can’t get away with it here at all. Once that sank in, things got a good
deal more civil.”

That made sense. “How’s the Assembly doing financially,
though, with taxes to pay?”

“Oh, not badly at all,” said Mohandas. “We rent out the hall
and the smaller meeting rooms quite a bit, of course, and this room—” He
gestured around us.“—is a school
lunchroom six days a week.” In response to my questioning look:“Yes, we have a school—a lot of,” he grinned,
“creedal associations do. Our curriculum’s very strong on science and math, as
you can imagine, strong enough that we get students from five and six counties
away.”

“That’s impressive,” I said. “I visited a school out in
Defiance County yesterday; it was—well, interesting is probably the right
word.”

“Well, then, you’ve got to come tour ours,” Chenkin said. “I
promise you, there’s no spectator sport in the world that matches watching a class
full of fourth-graders tearing into an essay that’s been deliberately packed
full of logical fallacies.”

That got a general laugh, which I joined. “I bet,” I said.
“Okay, you’ve sold me. I’ll have to see what my schedule has lined up over the
next few days, but I’ll certainly put a tour here on the list.”

“Delighted to hear it,” Mohandas said.

I wrote a note to myself in my pocket notebook. All the
while, though, I was thinking about the future of the Lakeland Republic. Unless
the science and math they taught was as antique as everything else in the
Republic, how would the kids who graduated from the Assembly school—and
equivalent schools in other cities, I guessed—handle being deprived of the
kinds of technology bright, science-minded kids everywhere else took for
granted?